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43 Comments
- Mangeof, on 10/29/2009, -2/+49400$ for 60GB
"For the masses"
Riiiight. - dirTdogE, on 10/28/2009, -2/+40"for the masses" ... "this drive might fit high-end gamers, but not Joe Average"
Maybe I need a dictionary? - Scr4tchFury, on 10/29/2009, -0/+32I think he's calling gamers fat.
- catalysis, on 10/29/2009, -0/+25I don't get why you would benchmark an SSD on Windows XP SP2 when Windows 7 has optimizations and native support for SSDs. At least update to service pack 3 if you are going to benchmark, it's over a year old. This data is meaningless.
- akwok, on 10/29/2009, -0/+18You use an SSD as a boot and primary app drive. If you're using it to store mass media, you're doing it wrong.
- Mankind121, on 10/29/2009, -3/+19this thing is pretty poorly written
- gothsquirrel, on 10/29/2009, -0/+16Thats not any where the near the cheapest SSD on the market. Who the ***** wrote this?
- Jakesterama, on 10/29/2009, -0/+10Holy *****, my 8 year old niece could write a more comprehensive and thought out review of a pile of rocks. To even call this a review is a stretch; it is more of a collection of random sentences and half ass-ed attempts to use some benchmarking software.
"Next, I copied a 4GB folder consisting of 1,619 files of varying sizes, including text documents, photos and video, from the desktop to the My Documents folder on the C drive. The folder transfer took 1 minutes, 20 seconds -- impressive"
Are you serious? 50MB/s is impressive? If you mean it is impressive compared to a carrier pidgin, then I guess I buy it. And what's with the plural on 'minute'? Do you even proof your articles?
http://blogs.computerworld.com/user/lucas_mearian - akwok, on 10/29/2009, -0/+7The 'new' Intel X25-M is pretty much as high-end as any user could need in an SSD, and it's only around $230 for 80gb. The OCZ Vertex is around the same price for 60gb. The X25-E is complete overkill.
There are even cheaper SSDs out there, and a new Kingston 40gb is slated for release next month with a $99 MSRP. http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1111/1/
An SSD upgrade for the main boot partition is a very, very worthwhile upgrade. While sustained read and writes are not that significantly better in synthetic benchmarks compared to say, a raptor, the < 0.1ms random access times are very noticeable in normal use.
FYI for fellow X25-M users: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/16159/1/ - goeric, on 10/29/2009, -1/+7For the masses, but not Joe Average.
Joe Average must not have any relation to Average Joe. - glendower, on 10/29/2009, -0/+6Still too rich for my blood, but good to see the prices are dropping quickly.
- dirTdogE, on 10/29/2009, -2/+7Well, no, it doesn't say "for the high-end masses," it says "high-end for the masses." There's a difference. Just like "Fast, red car for the masses" wouldn't mean it's for people who are both fast and red.
- Culyt, on 10/29/2009, -0/+5Probably poorly worded, its just not aimed at datacenters or extreme IO like those $2000 pci drives with 3000io/s a sec or TB of storage.
With that said, in 1.4 years, $200 (half way through 2011). Another 1.4, $100 (late 2012, 2013). then $50.
1.4 years is the halving time for NAND flash prices. Most drives don't even need 60gb. In any case, most workstations around would do fine with 30gb, 8gb for OS, another 8 for applications, leaves 16gb for whatever.
Any mass storage would do better on a fileserver. There might also be a speed up in price reduction as the drives do go mainstream. And in addition to the price drops the speed increases (you will probably be able to get the older model drives even cheaper).
I'm fairly happy with my 60gb OCZ vertex I got at about the same price. Probably wasn't quite worth it at the time but then Ubuntu 9.04 came along with its 10 second boot times followed by Ubuntu 9.10 with the 5 second boot. Windows 7 boot time kind of sucks by comparison though, even though its fairly fast. - Culyt, on 10/29/2009, -0/+5I haven't heard of any problems like that and my OCZ Vertex is going along fine. There are a few issues with specific firmware that can cause bricking (but only on specific settings like encryption).
People bring up the life expectancy of the flash chips, but that's generally at least 5 years, with heavyish use. And when they do fail, you drive doesn't stop working, just that bit (you might loose any data in that location of course)
Remember magnetic drives fail all the time too, and when they go they will often take all the data with them unless they start to die in a way giving you warning, like the click of death. Even when you do get warning, its generally in the form of data already being corrupted. - Darksoul, on 10/29/2009, -0/+4I wouldn't pay $400 for a hard drive period. I am a big gamer have been for decades now I just can't bring myself to buy a hard drive that costs upwards of over $400. I will wait till the prices come down and seriously with the economy like it is I can't see even gamers paying that much money for a hard drive when that $400 could buy them a motherboard and new cpu upgrade or a really nice video card. It can't be for the masses if its $400.....
The 40GB Kingston ones for $90 bucks is a better deal that I would buy and probably will. - akwok, on 10/29/2009, -0/+4It isn't just boot time reduction -- the overall improvement to system response is very noticeable. You're talking about a difference in random access time of almost two orders in magnitude...
Have you actually tried using an SSD before? How can you say that it's 'only really good in a server environment'? - Yage2006, on 10/29/2009, -1/+5And they will quickly realize that $399 is not for the masses.
$100-150 is for the masses and until it reaches that price point it will remain for those who don't mind paying for the high end.
It is an improvement but its not there yet. - inactive, on 10/29/2009, -0/+3I thought Sugarland was only a city.
The more you know. - tgc1, on 10/29/2009, -6/+9Meanwhile...
1TB = 76 dollars on sale this week at my local computer shop.
Yep, SSD's are looking mighty appealing these days. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea behind them. I like that they don't have moving parts. But come on. What the ***** are we going to do with 60 Gigs? That won't even fit half my Po... wait... nevermind. You heard nothing.
Carry on. - ArrangedEntropy, on 10/29/2009, -0/+2What masses are they talking about???
- tgc1, on 10/29/2009, -2/+4I know that. But are you really going to pay that much more for your computer to boot up 10 seconds faster? I think not.
These things are basically only really good in a server environment. - MalenfantX, on 10/29/2009, -0/+2It appears to be the cheapest SLC device. I'll stick with a 128gb MLC @$260 until capacity goes up and prices go down on the SLC drives.
- Mangeof, on 10/30/2009, -0/+2And why would workstations need a 'super-fast' SSD?
- MikeMania, on 10/29/2009, -0/+1Kingston has a 40GB one for 90 bucks. I'm sure its definitely not as high end as this, but its certainly a SSD for the masses.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/27/kingstons-85-40 ... - bmiami69, on 10/30/2009, -0/+1I agree with you. i bought four 1 terebyte drives each cost me 75 US dollars at Bestbuy and i had four 500 gigs already in the case so i use the old ones and a new one as back up. plus i burn everything on DVDs and at times i also back them onto external drives aswell. I have lost 4 drives that just stopped working in the past 7 years thats why i do this. Now im thinking if i get the SSD drives i wont want to back everything like im doing.
- Brak710101, on 10/29/2009, -2/+3No, this isn't the same.
There are high-end SSDs and low-ends. In this case, we're talking about a high-end SSD that is now affordable for consumers (gamers, mainly) and not just enterprise server systems. Server SSDs probably cost more than the highest-end graphics cards at one point for how little they really stored compared to HDDs. SSDs are still not at the price/storage point for grandma and grandpa's computer, but are for the aming and performance rigs.
I understand your grammatical point, but the title is fine, it's just awkward. - inactive, on 10/29/2009, -0/+1Check them out. Good music.
- mrBitch, on 10/30/2009, -0/+1While I agree the article is poorly written, I don't think I can agree that it's "pretty".
- inactive, on 10/29/2009, -0/+1Yeah, the OCZ forums are chock full of people having issues.
As well as reviews on sites like newegg - I understand hardware fails sometimes, even regular drives, but the rate these things appear crapping out is a bit unsettling.
Then again people blame it on "improper configuration", but you really shouldn't have to configure these things at all, IMO, if they wanna be successful - if it's a SATA interface then the system shouldn't be able to tell the difference. - JQP123, on 10/29/2009, -0/+1"People bring up the life expectancy of the flash chips, but that's generally at least 5 years, with heavyish use."
Per the article, the only really accurate measure of life expectancy in flash memory is write cycles. The industry standard lifetime rating is 100,000 write cycles. This figure is a conservative worst case but still.
Writing to the same bit once a second, this rating would be exceeded in just over 1 day.
Writing to the same bit once a minute, this rating would be exceeded in 69 days.
Most drives include "wear leveling" algorithms to spread the writes around (at the expense of data transfer rates) but the wear leveling algorithm starts to break down as the drive fills up. For a drive that is 50% full, wear leveling can only cut the wear rate in half (double the lifetime) under random re-write conditions.
Putting this into a heavily loaded server application might be a real, legitimate cause for concern. - TehProphet, on 10/29/2009, -0/+160gb for $400... yeah I can really see the mass market appeal in that. -_-
- wpf999, on 10/29/2009, -0/+1This illiterate clown has a degree?
- Suricou, on 10/29/2009, -0/+1The good ones are.
There have been problems with some of the cheapest ones though. - Suricou, on 10/29/2009, -0/+1Is it the cheapest in it's size/performance class?
Still no. - Jpatano, on 10/29/2009, -0/+1except that you're only getting 60 gb for $400... I could buy 4 of the 500gb drives for that much money, and have quadruple backup for the day when one of my drives fails.
- jasonbarone, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1Buried, for "uber-reliable"
- esc27, on 10/29/2009, -1/+1The programs and OS on my drive take up more than 60 GB, short of juggling software, that just isn't even close to enough space.
- PanicAK, on 10/29/2009, -2/+1I'm drunk and I haven't been up to date with computer technology lately (ask me anything about the late 90s), so that was a really long read, but interesting.
- mabakerbraker, on 10/29/2009, -3/+1OK, $399 seems so NOT like for the massses, especially in the times of the glooming economy. And:
"the drive achieved 245MB/sec sequential read and 190MB/sec sequential write timeOK, $399 seems so NOT like for the massses, especially in the times of the glooming economy. And:
"the drive achieved 245MB/sec sequential read and 190MB/sec sequential write time."
Well, am I the only one thinking about getting a U320 SCSI relay in RAID in order to get similar speeds for HALF the price and WITHOUT the cost of shortened reliability?."
Well, am I the only one thinking about getting a U329 SCSI relay in RAID in order to get similar speeds for HALF the price and WITHOUT the cost of shortened reliability? - Brak710101, on 10/29/2009, -5/+2"high-end SSD for the masses"
Leaving out a key part. - bmiami69, on 10/29/2009, -4/+1yeah it cost but losing a 500 gig hard drive is worse then spending 400 now and never worrying about ***** happening. i want one i have been using back up drives to back everything i put into my computer with the ssd i wont have to. ill start saving my money for them
- inactive, on 10/29/2009, -6/+1Sugarland? I love them! That lead singer is hot.
- inactive, on 10/29/2009, -7/+1Are SSD drives even stable?
I hear nothing but horror stories of data loss and other failures.. not too sure I wanna risk spending that much money for some very volatile hardware.
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